Anyone remembers "Pinocchio and The Emperor of the Night" (1987)?

[CyrusGrissom]

It's a really cool and very dark animated fantasy from Filmation (The dudes who made "He-Man", "She-Ra", "Fat Albert", "Bravestarr" and "Starchaser: Legend of Orin") for i believe is their best animated movie besides "Starchaser: Legend of Orin".

It's about a creepy mysterious carnival that comes to town, Pinocchio just celebrated his first birthday as a human and does an important assignment from his dad to deliver a jewel box to the mayor. He stumbles by a raccoon con artist and his monkey assistant who trade him the box for a worthless fake ruby, it pisses off Gheppto so much that Pinocchio decides to run away to join the carnival and he falls for a lovely girl puppet who is the star of the carnival's show. The evil puppet master Puppetino tricks him as he magically changes him back into a puppet, but he does escape from the carnival to find the two scumbags that swindled him earlier to go after the traveling carnival only to end up in the hellish nightmarish and Las Vegas-esque empire of the night conducted by the evil Emperor.

Nicely animated and very entertaining fantasy flick with the voices of James Earl Jones, Scott Grimes, Don Knotts, Tom Bosley, Jonathan Harris, Rickie Lee Jones and Ed Asner. I remembered watching this at a movie theater after christmas at a shopping mall back in 1987, it scared the living crap out of me especially with that absolutely horrifying scene where Pinocchio slowly transforms back into a puppet as he's being tortured by Puppetino and his magic music box with creepy music and lots of puppets in close-up during the music.

I have this on DVD-R after copying my tape to DVD, i just wish Anchor Bay would release this on R1 DVD with the theatrical trailer, that would be cool.